As you can probably imagine, the thought of a tubular
reactor with no pressure drop would
make the chemical industries’ mouth water. This would be
ideal, but in the real world it is not realistic. As the gas
flows through the pipe, there is a frictional force along the
perimeter of the pipe due to the no-slip condition. In the study of fluid mechanics it shows
that the friction applied to
the fluid increases as the flow rate increases. Knowing that the
flow rate of the reaction increases along the length of the pipe
means that the drop in pressure must continue to decrease in the
duration of the reaction.
In this case, we will be assuming that the function of the pressure is as follows:
where p is pressure in the
reactor and z is the length along the reactor.
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